Billionaires like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia boss Jensen Huang have accumulated a record amount of wealth.

The richest 500 people in the world now have a combined net worth of £8trillion – or $10trillion.

Meanwhile, nearly 700million people are in extreme poverty, living on less than £1.71 per day, according to the World Bank.

Just under half the population – 44%, or 3.5 billion people – live on less than £5.46, which is thepoverty line in upper-middle income countries like Brazil, Algeria, Ukraine and China.

Musk, Zuckerberg and Huang may top the charts, but they aren’t the only tech titans up there, Bloomberg reports.

They’re closely followed by Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Collectively, the eight of them gained more than £477billion in wealth this year.

This accounts for 43% of the £1.2trillion increase seen by the 500 richest people tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Musk, the world’s richest man, saw his own worth nearly double to £352billion in 2024.

This was aided by the re-election of his ally Donald Trump as President of the United States, who he backed with money and the power of his social media platform X.

He may be increasingly controversial, but it resulted in boost to the stock prices of his companies Tesla, SpaceX and xAI.

This saw him pull further ahead of second-placed Jeff Bezos than ever before – with a record gap of £188billion.

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